IBM enters the free search tools market

15 December 2006

With the launch on 13 December 2006 of OmniFind Yahoo Edition (OYE), IBM has made a highly public move against rivals like Google and Microsoft.

As the name suggests, the new product stems from a partnership between IBM and Yahoo. IBM supplies the search engine, based on the open-source Apache Lucene software, and Yahoo lends its user interface and Web search services.

IBM’s Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) framework provides the underlying processing pipeline from Lucene but is not exposed for use by developers or OEMs. (See IBM posts UIMA as a standard for more on this architecture.) Bundled in are some configuration and administration tools.

The result is a simple-to-use — and free — product that can index and search up to half a million documents on an intranet, including specified external Web pages. The 500,000-page limit is a licensing, rather than a performance, matter. User organisations can licitly run multiple copies of the software, each on a different server. Searching would remain per server, though, not across servers.

OYE can also search the entire public Web via Yahoo. The software uses an adapted version of the familiar Yahoo interface for all searches. Administrators can customise the interface, as this screen grab shows [omitted from this excerpt]. Integration with Web sites is enabled either through built-in options or by using the OmniFind API, which is based on REST (Representational State Transfer) norms.

This is the start of an article that will appear on the IT Analysis Web site next week. Look out for it there.

Meanwhile, you might like to try the software yourself. You can get it here, free. IBM is adamant that this is not a desktop computer searcher, so if your PC staggers under the indexing load, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

I think OYE is potentially a market-shaping product. It will give Yahoo a much-needed boost against Google and it will give IBM much-needed publicity outside ‘Big Blue’ shops for its impressive OmniFind range of information-handling products.

The IBM-Yahoo partnership is an interesting pairing, looking a little like a case of my enemy’s enemy being my friend. The corporate cultures could hardly be more dissimilar. I look forward to seeing what else there is to come from it.